[9fans] Niggles

[lucio@proxima.alt.za]

Just a few oddities with a recent version of Plan 9.

1.  In text mode, the keyboard handler seems to be a little erratic.
In RIO no problems seem to occur.  The behaviour seems to be caused by
the occasional backspace and consists of the addition of spurious
characters that are not echoed to the screen.  Hard to describe, even
harder to pinpoint.  The most common situation is an invalid command
name or command argument value that has a space or some other
character in it not present in the command line itself.  It is
frequent enough to be a bit of a bother on an auth or cpu server.  I
can't recall if I ever encountered on the FS. I think the problem
appeared in 4th Edition, I can probably check later this month.

Hm, I haven't ever checked if switching to VGA mode makes a difference
or not.

2.  My Intellimouse seems to be misunderstood: the right button quite
regularly starts duplicating the middle button function in RIO, SAM
and ACME; a wloc command in any window restores it to its more useful
behaviour.  I only noticed this recently, I'm using a stand-alone
workstation with the second ISO image (the one I asked Russ about a
few days before its recent release - I think it's current, send me a
digest and I'll compare).

3.  I started getting vncv lockouts so I switched to a newer
workstation, keeping the disks unchanged and the lockouts as well as
frequent vncv failures have stopped.  I find this quite baffling, but
not unexpected.  I also have a Gygabyte motherboard that seems
incapable of handling any OSes like Plan 9, NetBSD or WinNT that need
real memory protection.  I think it's MMU related.  Hm, could be
CPU-related, too, the chip is Cyrix/IBM rather than Intel, but I think
I tried a different CPU once.

Can't think of anything else presently, I may follow up on this if I
recall or encounter any other small issues that one can easily live
with.

++L